Positive reconstruction · reader-scoped, not an inferred-absence lacuna
This reconstruction covers the readable fraction of Thomas Jefferson's formation -- attested reading and writing only, not the whole of a life.
Thomas Jefferson and The Enquirer (Ritchie's newspaper)
Thomas Jefferson's attested relationship to The Enquirer (Ritchie's newspaper).
Thomas Jefferson is attested as having read this work by Thomas Ritchie.
Evidence ledger
- First-person reading testimony (Explicit first-person habitual reading claim of a named periodical: 'I read no newspaper now but Ritchie's.' The paper's masthead title (the Enquirer) is corroborated in-corpus by the Roane letter ('I had read in the Enquirer...'). The same frame carries the generic classical-corpus claim ('I read nothing, therefore, but of the heroes of Troy, of the wars of Lacedaemon and Athens, of Pompey and Caesar') - real but title-less, recorded here rather than invented as Works.). Self-report reliability discount 0.85: Current, habitual, and self-deprecating ('I read no newspaper now but Ritchie's, and in that chiefly the advertisements, for they contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper') - the dismissive candor strengthens credibility; discount for the professed shallowness of the engagement (chiefly advertisements).